Photo: Flickr feck_aRt_post
“Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.”
Edward de Bono
Breaking pattern is a way to get unexpected solutions to your problems and to create unexpected ideas. To survive in the world, we look for patterns and we create patterns. Patterns dictate what we do and our daily life is regulated by patterns.
There are several techniques that can we use to break thinking patterns such as random words. But the environment and the time of the day might also influence how successful we are in breaking established patterns
Exhaustion can spur creativity and help us break patterns. When we are tired, we just do not care. Instead of thinking about perfecting what it is we are working on our brains end up jumping around, accepting ideas and new paths of thinking. It is a bit like we are running wild and our frontal lobes cannot stop our ideas.
Photo Matt Davenport
Circadian rhythm is an approximately 24 – hour cycle that determines our sleeping and feeding patterns. Cultural norms mean that most of us follow a routine – we get up with the sun and we go to bed when the moon rises in the sky. This specific pattern has influenced the way different regions in our brains work. The frontal cortex is a part of the brain that is very fussy and when we get tired our working memory loses some of its sharpness. The frontal cortex does not shut down but it does not process everything that is happening around you.
Since our frontal cortex is not focusing on sorting new incoming information from our environment, there is energy for other parts of our brains to play around freely. In short, by blocking our working memory and our brains ability to sieve through various information increase and we can break thinking patterns.
Of course, there is people who are not more creative at night. They simply have a different pattern and by breaking their specific pattern, they might be able to let ideas run around more freely.
So when you are trying to do creative work, you will have more lucky when your brain is not functioning efficiently. Personally, I love to read a couple of sententes in a book when I am tired and then I explore all sort of possibilities. Most ideas are utter nonsense but they often put a smile on my face before I fall asleep. And no, it does not seem to matter what sort of book I read!
Book Tips
The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain
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